"These poems--selected from the past three decades--are firmly rooted in what Richard Wilbur called the ""hunks and colors of the world."" They faithfully try to take into account a world we did not make and, at the same time, record the terrifying and painful contradictions of human experience. And finally, they try to do so while remaining open to the intrinsic joy of being. These are poems rooted in the belief that words can invoke those presences which bring us back, again and again, to the fundamental experience of being: that there is something rather than nothing. The poems in A Word In My Mouth embody, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, ""the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire."" "